Monday, 24 September 2012

Vang Vieng

I was
sceptical about even visiting Vang Vieng in the first place. It has a
reputation for being a loud and obnoxious party town that caters specifically
to backpackers who want to get wasted on buckets (yes buckets) of cheap whiskey
and BeerLao. Not my scene, at all. However, since Huay Xai we had started
hearing rumours that things were changing in this central Laos party hotspot, and from what I saw,
things really are.

Let me put
it this way, in 2012 11 people have died whilst tubing down the river in Vang
Vieng, they usually die because they’ve drank their body weight in Tiger
whiskey and have decided to jump into a river full of massive rocks from a
giant slide. On average 4 backpackers die every month in Vang Vieng. Tubing is
the big draw for a lot of people. You rent a giant rubber tube from town, get a
tuk-tuk down to the riverside and then sit in the tube and float back to town,
only on the way back, there are several bars along the river most of which have
water rides, a recipe for disaster if I ever did hear about one. Oh, and that
happy pizza you saw on the menu, yeah, that ain’t happy because it’s so
delicious, it’s happy because they’ve thrown a load of hallucinogenic drugs on
top of it.

So, what’s
changed? Well, on August 31st the Lao government stepped in and shut
down all of the bars along the main tube run and have cracked down on all the
drugs and heavy drinking going on in Vang Vieng. The result is a ghost town.
There was just nobody there. We saw a few people tubing down the river but they
weren’t drunk and they looked pretty bored if you ask me. The bars along the
riverside in town were practically all empty despite the fact that they were
playing re-runs of Friends and Family Guy on a loop. The Lao Culture
and Tourism board want to completely reinvent Vang Vieng to pull in a less
rowdy cliental, and a month in, it seems to be working. Once word gets around
that the party is over in Vang Vieng, then those booze hounds will have to find
a new town to destroy.

Outside of
the video-bars and tourist driven downtown area Vang Vieng is a truly beautiful
place. The river flows gently beneath these huge limestone cliffs that fade
away into the clouds in the distance and they make for some great exploring.

We headed
out to the ‘Blue Lagoon’ which is a lot more green than blue this time of year,
no matter, the main draw of the place is a giant cave that sits half way up the
cliff side. Unfortunately, like everything else in Vang Vieng, the cave has
been subsidised and you have to pay to get in. The man sat beneath the path to
the cave had a giant spider crawling all over him. It was about the size of his
head, it was bright yellow with black stripes and black legs and the man said
it was very poisonous. It was one of the scariest things in the world. It was
huge and it was just crawling all over the man who seemed pretty un-phased by
the whole affair. I took his photo and we started climbing up the side of the
cliff.

It was
quite a ramble up the steep slope that was covered with giant leaves and insects,
as we got higher up, the more dense the jungle seemed to become, but after
about ten minutes climbing we finally got to the entrance of the cave. We threw
our headlamps on and headed inside. I have honestly never seen anything like it
before in my life. The cave was gigantic, the sunlight poured in through a hole
in the ceiling which illuminated all of the rocks below, there were passageways
leading off in all directions, there were vast holes which fell into
nothingness and there were pools which had formed in small pockets of the cave
interior. It was like being in the mines of Moria.

This
wouldn’t be the only cave we would venture inside on our stay in Vang Vieng. We
didn’t fancy tubing or drinking so all that was really left to do was explore the
countryside and the caves.

On our
second day we went looking for adventure, we left the town on foot and headed
out into the cliffs, we eventually stumbled across a sign that pointed to a
cave and figured we’d been walking long enough and we wanted to do some caving.
We followed the sign through a huge rice paddy and then through the jungle
until we got to a small outpost that two guys were sat upon. They told us it
was 10,000kip to go inside the cave so we paid up and headed through the forest
towards the bottom of the cliff.

This cave
was very different to the first one that we had explored. One of the guys from
the outpost followed us to the entrance, handed us some headlamps and showed us
the way inside. You had to duck down into a small puddle and under a rock to
get in, inside there were some bats hanging out on the roof and the whole room
was pretty large. The guide pointed to a far corner where a trail went off into
the interior of the cave. As soon as we edged around the narrow rocks we were
told to leave our shoes and our bags and we descended a rickety old ladder into
an even narrower path a little lower down. There were huge crickets jumping
around under foot, the mud was incredibly slippery and thick, there were
puddles of water at every turn and the walls were wet and provided no decent
grip.

I started
getting pretty nervous about this cave, pretty quickly. If our lights went out
then it would be pitch black and there would be no way out, if it started
raining then surly the cave would fill up and we would drown, the ladders we
were descending into the cave upon were made of rickety old wood and were
falling apart, barely resting on the slippery granite walls. There was one hole
that we had to cross on top of two old bamboo poles which were just as slippery
as the floor and if we would have fallen we probably would have been falling to
our doom. We kept going and the guide kept reassuring us that “it’s no problem,
it’s very easy”. We walked further and further into the cave for a long time, climbing
up and down ladders, ducking under giant rocks and splashing through deep
puddles, thick with brown mud.

Eventually
we made it to the back of the cave and there was one final descent to a huge
swimming pool below, however, to get there we would have to descend steps that
were made out of the very mud we had been sliding upon our whole way through
the cave and we decided it wasn’t worth the risk so we turned around and went
back the way we came, which was just as daunting, nerve wrecking and heart wrenching
as before.

We were
happy to get out of the most claustrophobic space we had even been inside, we
were covered in mud and filth and had a new found appreciation for our lives.
The conclusion of this cautionary tale is that Vang Vieng doesn’t just have to
be about drinking buckets of whiskey, watching re-runs of Friends and tubing
down the river, you can in-fact do some pretty amazing things there, but you’ll
probably still put your life on the line. It’s certainly not for everyone.

We’re in
Vientiane now, the capital city of Laos and we just walked around the old
run-down Lao National Museum, which is basically a communist propaganda centre,
but it had a few interesting things going for it and I read a lot about the UXO
situation here in Laos, which is truly devastating. We’re looking forward to
exploring the city some more tomorrow and we hope not to go inside any more
caves anytime soon, although it was incredibly enjoyable.

2 comments:

Just started catching up on what you've been doing since you started traveling. Wow. I can hardly even imagine Vang Vieng like that. For me it'll always be the most lawless place in the world for spoiled trust-fund backpackers. Surreal.

I've been keeping tabs on you as well, sounds like you're having an amazing experience and that you're really getting to know people along the road. Amazing! I'm very happy that everything's working out for you. In other news, Vang Vieng was like an abandoned theme park, there were certainly signs that it was once the trust fund backpacker playground you told me about, but the streets were mostly empty, the video bars mostly shut, and the tubing run, from what I heard, was nothing more than a river, no bars, no rides. It was a weird experience, we had a great time in the caves and countryside though. I'm happy to say I did what I set out to do: I went to Vang Vieng, didn't go tubing and didn't drink a single drop of alcohol. Life is good.